Speculative Fiction—an all-encompassing genre created to describe stories of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, and other stories that have an element of “What if...” in them. A story in speculative fiction is one that adds an element of the unreal, or asks, what would become of our society if history took a different direction at some important event? Fiction with a little something extra thrown in.—William D. Richards

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Tuesday, December 19, 2017

The Siege of Sirius: A Splintered Galaxy Novel by Eddie R. Hicks

Release date: December 12, 2017

Subgenre: Space opera

About The Siege of Sirius:

The dream to travel to the stars has become the nightmare to escape from them.Rebecca’s
passion for space exploration made her a captain. Living through an
alien invasion made her strong enough to endure the harshness of the
galaxy.

Rebecca has been given the opportunity of a life time, command of the ESRS Carl Sagan
an exploration and colonization starship. She along with her trusted
crew embark on an expedition to establish the human race’s most remote
colony located in the heart of the Sirius system.

Upon awaking
from their multiyear cryostasis sleep, Rebecca and her crew quickly
discovers that what exists in the Sirius system isn’t what scientists
had predicted.

Not even remotely close.

Their journey to
the brightest star in the skies of Earth has now become a dreadful
catastrophe with the potential to reach Earth if left unchecked. With
innocent colonists at risk and no means of communicating with Earth,
Rebecca must abandon her primary mission of exploration in order to take
on a new one, survival.

Fans of Star Trek, Mass Effect and
Stargate will feel right at home with this standalone spin-off adventure
part of the Splintered Galaxy series. It is not necessary to read any
of the other books to enjoy this.

Excerpt:

A strong storm front pushed
onto the east coast of America . . . and the rest of the world.

Plasma rained from the skies,
it didn’t stop. Its thunderous roars leveled entire cities in a matter of
minutes. Rebecca’s home was no longer safe.

Her eyes opened, her head
throbbed with pain, her hair a disaster, and her teenage body pinned under a
bookshelf. Every window shattered into thousands of fragments. The TV crashed
onto the burning floor; seconds earlier it was playing the Emergency Alert
System. Her home glowed red and orange as raging fires ripped through it,
releasing intense heat and choking smoke in its wake. The ground rumbled, over
and over.

Expensive posh curtains had
been reduced to charred material, the staircase leading upstairs had all but
collapsed. Her mother frantically yanked Rebecca back up after unburying her
from the fallen bookshelf and debris amidst the hellfire inferno. Rebecca
staggered slightly upon seeing the state of their once upscale neighborhood. It
was as if the apocalypse was upon them.

Alien space ships appeared
before the rising sun, spilling orbs of green plasma down onto the city of
Nashville.

Her mother tugged on her arm
trying to drag her out of the burning house and out and into her car. Only it’s
not where Rebecca wanted to go, not yet at least. She broke free from her
mother’s grip and darted to their backyard patio, past the searing, hot flames
and black smoke. She couldn’t leave it behind, not after all the work she had
put into earning enough money to buy it for her father. The telescope had to
come with them during their escape, alien invaders were not going to take it
away.

Rebecca had fond memories of
growing up in this house over the last eighteen years of her life. She ran
through its halls and rooms enough times to know how long it would take to run
to the patio, then run back into the house and out the front door to freedom. Ignore the fire, heat, and smoke, and you
got this, she told herself. Yes, there was no reason why she shouldn’t try
to get the telescope before turning tail and fleeing.

Her mother panicked and
pleaded with her to return as Rebecca made her way through the flames; pleading
that went unanswered, Rebecca needed to focus on the task at hand. She arrived
at the deck, it too was set ablaze. Her bare feet bled; she forgot to take into
account the hot shards of glass littering the floor. Rebecca secured the
telescope in her hands, refusing to look at and assess the damage done to her
body.

There was one final task left;
to escape with the telescope in hand. A task she didn’t plan out very well as
she saw the flames that engulfed her home spread quickly. There was no safe
route back to the driveway up front. The heat caused her to sweat profusely and
the smoke forced her to cough nonstop.

She heard what sounded like
her father calling out to her from inside. She tried to follow the source of
his voice, in hopes that he might have found a safe route to travel inside the
burning house. Her frantic search for her father’s voice came to an end when
she was once again knocked backward in the wake of plasma bombardment from the
alien invaders.

About Eddie R. Hicks:

Eddie R. Hicks is a Canadian author known as a man of many
talents, and for good reason. He’s educated in media arts, journalism,
and culinary arts, and now he writes dark and sexy science-fiction
thrillers such as the Splintered Galaxy series.

If he’s not
working with skilled chefs in the restaurant industry, baking an epic
red velvet cake for the hell of it, or playing video games, then he’s in
front of his computer doing what he always dreamed of doing since he
was a kid: storytelling.

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